Family

This is a continuation of my ‘honest’ posts where I finally say things which I haven’t said before. It’s not happy at the start, but please fight through it. There’s a light at the end.

I think it’s relatively clear to anyone who has read my earliest posts that I had quite a long stretch of depression a few years back. It flavoured probably the entirety of the first year, and certainly influences everything I write to this day. What has changed is how. It was at first a dark influence, entangling everything with chains of negativity, but now it has become a positive force.

Today I want to talk about how my former depression made me who I am today. A huge proportion of people experience depression during their lives, and every experience is different. I really feel that the more there is about turning that depression around on the internet, the better. There is only so much you can learn about depression from a health website, as it’s such a personal condition. Personal experience is important in getting above it.

I’m going to a gig in a few days. A band called Anathema is playing in Leeds Minster and I’m more than excited. I feel like it was an inevitability to see these beautiful people eventually, Because despite the apparent disconnectedness to today’s theme, Anathema is an integral part of my escape from Depression.

Funnily enough, I’ve talked about this band before on the blog. Why? How does a single band get so much coverage on a blog with very little link to music? Because their music changed me. They are one of a few bands in the world that are so important to me that they have influenced who I am very clearly. I’ll come back to Anathema in a bit.

It took me a long time to realise I was depressed. Several years actually. From about 14 to 17 years old, I was depressed without accepting that fact. I only realised when it became too much, when the darkest ideas had sprung into my head and I noticed that it wasn’t healthy to be having these thoughts. I won’t go into them too much, but they weren’t too happy.

I went to the doctor. I was given a form. I filled it out. I got very close to the ‘ seriously dangerously depressed’ mark on the form. The doctor sent me to talk to a counselor.

At this point I still hadn’t worked out why I was depressed. Depression is confusing – it has to be for it to go relatively unnoticed for 3 years. I was about to find out why I was in this awful position.

I only needed to see the counselor once. She referred me to a more serious counselor, but I never went. In a few days, I wouldn’t need to.

The meeting with this counselor was strange – terrifying at the time – but the realisations I made in that meeting changed everything. It was the first time that I explained everything to another person, and in doing so it was the first time I explained everything that was making me depressed to myself.

I found out that my depression boiled down in the end to a lack of trust, A feeling of failure, and fear.

the worst part is that it seemed to stem mainly from my family.

When I was 17 I genuinely no longer trusted a single person in my family. The only person I trusted in the whole world was one of my friends. One friend. And I got to this point because…

Fear. Two people in a household of four were prone to being incredibly aggressive and I have always been pretty non-confrontational. I was however for a while convinced that one day I would be attacked during one of their uncontrollable rages. Because of this I had the entire house mapped. Despite hating violence, I knew what I could use as a weapon in every room of the house if I needed to. Some days I was convinced I would need to know.

There was also the constant feud between my two divorced parents. Little did they know how much that feud tore me into pieces. I didn’t know who to believe, so I chose to believe no one. One parent always told me how I was being manipulated by the other. The other parent did not say how I was being manipulated by the other. I only realised a few years ago that by being told I was being manipulated, I was manipulated by those comments.

Then there was the feeling of failure. I always prided myself in being smart. Up to the start of secondary school I was at the top of the class for everything but sport, and depending on the sport I wasn’t awful at that either. Then, from a mixture of boredom of the ease of work, and pressure from the formerly mentioned things, i stopped caring. By the time I was 16, my grades had dropped considerably and I didn’t enjoy learning anymore.

I also had loved extra-curricular activities. I had loved music lessons. I had loved Scouts. I had loved swimming and table tennis. A couple of years of feeling like a failure and I didn’t enjoy these things anymore.

And perhaps the most important part of my feeling of failure, was a member of my family who certainly didn’t hold back on telling me how stupid I was. Every day I would be called ‘stupid, moron, idiot’ +numerous angry expletives. After a while you start to believe that rubbish. My reaction was to become completely apathetic to it. Which naturally made me appear more stupid. I wouldn’t answer questions, lest I appeared stupid. I certainly wouldn’t ask questions, because that’s apparently what stupid people need to do (NOT TRUE IN THE SLIGHTEST), I wouldn’t shout back at the accusations of stupidity, because I hate confrontation. Withering away under an onslaught of insults was the only option.

And so it was this realisation of distrust, fear and failure that I found myself after this counseling meeting… I had one very bleak day after this.

But just one…

Now back to Anathema. They started out as a doom metal band. Doesn’t sound like a too hopeful solution to depression, does it? The thing is that their music has evolved beyond recognition from those early days (which are also excellent, but very different) and now Anathema creates some of the most soul-resonating music, I would argue, ever made.

And so the following day, as i was walking back home from school I was thinking about the dark place I was in, desperately looking for a solution now that I had pinpointed the causes of my depression. I put Anathema on on my mp3 player.

This I what I heard.

“Needed time to clear my mindAnd breathe the free air find some peace thereI used to keep my heart in jailBut the choice was love or fear of pain and

I…Chose…Love…Cos everything is energy and energy is you and me…

Light shines in through an open windowShines inside your heart and soul andLight will guide your way through timeAnd love will help you heal your mind and

Life…Will…Be..

Cos everything is energy and energy is you and me…”

A choice of love or fear of pain.

And my solution became completely clear. The answer was to forgive and love everything.

In a moment, the world turned beautiful. It was like the switch of a light. One moment It was dark, and suddenly the world was beautiful and I was crying. I looked around me as if I had never seen the world before, marveling at the sky, the birds, the trees.

I never told anyone that I had done this. I didn’t run up to my parents and say ‘I forgive you’. They would have been confused if I had, because they wouldn’t have known they had ever done anything wrong. In fact in many ways, this is a horrifically brutal blog, because I never said to them that I felt they played a vital role in my depression, and now it is on the internet for the world to see. 6 billion eyes could potentially look at this. But they can rest at least in the knowledge that they were completely forgiven a few years ago.

Over the course of the following week, I was called stupid numerous times by that particular family member (it still happens to this day actually). It didn’t matter. I’d forgiven them and I only had love at that point. Aggressive comments were directed from one parent at the other (but not the other way round – that rarely happens, to this day). It didn’t matter. I’d forgiven both parents for any wrong-doing they had done, and I had only love. The completely blown out of proportion aggression towards normal every-day inconveniences from one family member continued. It didn’t matter. It was forgiven, I no longer looked for weapons around the room I was standing in when it all kicked off.

I made my odd escape from depression through total forgiveness and love. i only found the answer through a band called Anathema. For all I know, that band might have saved my life.

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And now I sit here, wondering if I should publish this or not. It’s a completely honest piece, and I have been striving to be as honest as possible, that honesty hurts. If certain family members read this, they would be hurt severely by it.

Maybe for most people the question seems easy. For me, it’s an incredibly difficult question which only get harder over time. It makes me wonder if it really is such an easy question for everybody.

I’m from Edinburgh and have considered Scotland to be home for a long time. Yet, I spent most of my time in the south-east of England near Cambridge up until I was nearly 20. Already I seem divided between two places – where I come from and love, or where I was brought up.

Then there is that age-old saying of ‘home is where the heart is’, and I’ve always taken that to mean home is where your family and loved ones are. What do you do then, when the majority of your family live far away in other countries? My parents live in different towns. Other than them and my brother, my family is far away in the Netherlands or New Zealand, in places too far to reach often enough. Is the UK home, because my parents and brother are here? Is New Zealand home, because my parents are from there and much of my family are there? Is the Netherlands home, as my dad’s family are mainly living there?

I actually saw some of my Dutch family just a few days ago for Christmas. It was the first time in over 15 years that I’d visited them in the Netherlands. Given that i’m 21, that’s a fair proportion of my life without having the opportunity to know my family. Naturally it was lovely to be there, and I really had a nice time. But I realised just how little I know about my own family. It felt as if I had missed a whole part of my life in a way. My uncle took us on a cycling tour round Den Haag, pointing out where family members had lived in the past. There was, and still is, so little that I knew about my Dutch heritage. I was however comfortable there. Despite not seeing my family in the Netherlands for most of my life, it was almost as if I’d seen them all a few weeks ago – almost like a home.

As for my family in New Zealand, all the way on the other side of the world, I haven’t seen them for over a decade too. I was 7 when I last visited the land of the long white cloud. As I said above however, It’s where my parents come from. Their childhood stories are all from there, filled with people I’ve never had the chance to know, and some I never will. I’ve heard wonderful things about wonderful places across the country, but I don’t know it. Yet it has some sort of magnetic pull: a place of roots; a place with a home.

So there are 4 apparent ‘homes’. Is my home England? Scotland? New Zealand? The Netherlands?

But now, I’ve lived in China for a year. I have my family of friends there, my little Chinese desert town, my former flat, my former workplace. In many ways it was my first clearly defined home; No split between time with each parent, no time divided between Edinburgh and Cambridgeshire, no worrying about family feuding. I was far away, in charge of everything in my own world. Was that more a home than the everlasting crevasse between the two places in the UK deemed as home?

Working out what home is has however been a hard question for me always. I spent most of my time near Cambridge, yet I never felt more at home than in Edinburgh. As i got older, Cambridgeshire positively Didn’t feel like home. I still talk about Cambridgeshire being the most dull part of the UK, despite the fact that it probably isn’t – it just doesn’t suit me in the slightest. The point here, is that for me, the place that would conventionally be labelled as my home, is really rather un-homely. Yes, I have some family there. Yes, most of my friends are there. But there is no feeling of home. No Heritage like the Netherlands. No pull like new Zealand. No love for the area like in Edinburgh. No sense of being like in China.

And yet, I don’t live in any of these places currently. I study in Leeds, so the place I’m usually at is the middle of the UK in Yorkshire. I feel relatively strongly that Leeds isn’t home. I can’t explain why, but it simply isn’t.

Home appears to me not to be where you live.Leeds is not my home. It doesn’t seem to be as simple as where you were born – I know my dad for example doesn’t feel that New Zealand is fully his home anymore, and I’m conflicted over whether Edinburgh can be called my home (despite the fact I always do say it is). Home can’t just be where the family is. The family is everywhere…

And so I don’t really know what home is. One day I might know. I plan to keep an eye out for home.

Do any readers have an opinion of what home is? I’d love a comment below with your ideas.